Daily News

Partners for a Healthier Community Wins Grant for Asthma Project

SPRINGFIELD — The Green & Healthy Homes Initiative (GHHI), following a national competition, has awarded grants and support to Partners for a Healthier Community in Springfield, as well as Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo (Buffalo, N.Y.), Health Net of West Michigan (Grand Rapids, Mich.), and Le Bonheur Community Health and Well-Being (Memphis, Tenn.), to advance their Pay for Success (PFS) projects.

GHHI is providing these grants and services through funding awarded last year from the Corp. for National and Community Service’s (CNCS) Social Innovation Fund (SIF) to support SIF Pay for Success projects that address social determinants of health. These awards will build off of the past work of the SIF projects to assess the feasibility of the PFS financing model and advance high-quality, promising projects toward launch.

Each of the PFS projects focuses on providing comprehensive services to asthmatics in low-income communities. These services include home-based care and addressing environmental triggers of asthma such as pests and mold. These services will lead to better health and quality-of-life outcomes for families and reduce emergency-department visits and hospitalizations due to asthma, saving healthcare costs. Prior work has shown that a PFS transaction is feasible, and GHHI will be working with the awardees to pilot the home-based services, work with their state Medicaid programs on any needed policies to advance PFS, and engage partners such as potential investors as the projects advance toward launch.

“We are honored to build upon the great work over the last couple years and advance these promising projects that will bring much-needed services for families,” said Ruth Ann Norton, GHHI president and CEO. “Through utilizing Pay for Success, we will help our partners scale home-based interventions for asthma. To truly impact the health of populations, we need to move beyond the walls of the hospital and clinics, and these four projects will establish a mechanism to truly scale services that address social determinants of health.”

Added Lois Nembhard, acting director of the Social Innovation Fund at CNCS, the grants “will help build a powerful pipeline to take more Pay for Success projects from feasibility to implementation. We are thrilled to support the expansion of Green & Healthy Homes Initiative’s work in providing customized developmental support for these four projects to advance health equity and address the social determinants of health.”